Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Refuge in flowers and fake leather, refuge in claws and blood, refuge in cider and garlic, refuge in snowstorms and cold water.

I don't yet have my prescribed collection of prosthetic banana slugs to continually kneed my right shoulder in shifts because the leechmonger hasn't dispensed any before & can't figure out how to bill medicaid.

I tore a handkerchief to shreds like an underprovisioned medic or a bored dog.

Working the micro-fish office. Distributing the flakes, drying the projection lens plates between uses, explaining live data storage to curious patrons.

When I was 17, helping a costume mistress friend, a woman who'd been flirting with me as I took her measurements for something faux-Victorian asked if I ever felt I'd been born too late. "An era in which I could be happy hasn't come yet," I said in the grimmest voice I had.

I've received & fitted a cross-strap apron & a two-strap harness in the last couple days, so this may be the sharpest my proprioception's going to get all year. Just a historically unrivaled awareness of my lower back.

C'mon, you're not supposed the sever the clover's stem before you eat it. The luck starts leaking out right away and you need to catch as much of it as you can in your mouth. Letting it pool under the tongue is traditional, but not necessary.

By far the most-read thing I've ever written was a translation of a French children's book about a vampire girl, done as a favor.

I finally told someone about having been sexually assaulted nearly 20 years ago, and part of my description of the circumstances was that, "It was absolute Americana, really."

That's exactly what I wanted to know.

Dream of some sort of ordeal, who cares, interrupted by a roofer hammering the chimney flashing hard enough to shake my bed like Northridge. I sleep nestled against the house's spine, I guess.

I assume that if all of Darger's narrative work were digitized into a big piratable pdf, within a week twitter would be plastered with passages it'd seem absurd for biographers to have missed.

Dream of becoming poison dart frogs in the course of eluding an incursion of doppelgänger, quite taking to a subtle life held in the now monumental structures of whichever rooms of their/our dim green & dripping manse their daily routines left temporarily unoccupied.

Dream of being stalked by someone who, though imprisoned far away, could with great effort manifest near me in a variety of shapes. Many days she would only manage to form something like a worm, able to mewl my name while rapidly squirming towards me to be crushed under my boot.

She began singing in imitation after a taut flax cord brushed across the spine of one of the long saws, and the others followed suit. The sawyers & hauliers downed tools, retreating to their trucks until the cacophony dwindled & calmed.

I have never done anything by accident. My every action is a machination furthering the baleful plot I formulated while the surgeon extracted me. You catch me smugly smirking as I bandage a papercut, intentionality oozing with the blood.

Generic girl-presents from men who no longer believe they can imagine what I might want.
(.. are an improvement, and can scent me so strongly with coconut that I become immersed in the memory of being five years old at a hotel bar, soothingly dim inside another hot day.)